Defying classification in terms of a single academic discipline such as history, sociology, political
science, or philosophy, The Origins of Totalitarianism presents a startling interpretation of modern
European intellectual currents and political events. Still difficult to grasp in its entirety, the book's
climactic delineation of the living dead, of those "inanimate" beings who experienced the full force
of totalitarian terror in concentration camps, cut more deeply into the consciousness of some of
Arendt's readers than the most shocking photographs of the distorted bodies of the already dead.
Such readers realized that there are torments worse than death, which Arendt described in terms of
the longing for death by those who in former times were thought to have been condemned to the
eternal punishments of hell. She meant this vision of hell to be taken literally and not allegorically,
for although throughout the long centuries of Christian belief men had proved themselves incapable
of realizing the city of God as a dwelling place for human beings, they now showed that it was
indeed possible to establish hell on earth rather than in an afterlife.

Arendt added totalitarianism to the list of kinds of government drawn up in antiquity and hardly
altered since then: monarchy (the rule of one) and its perversion in tyranny; aristocracy (the rule of
the best) and its corruption in oligarchy or the rule of cliques; and democracy (the rule of many)
and its distortion in ochlocracy or mob rule. The hallmark of totalitarianism, a form of rule
supported by "superfluous" masses who sought a new reality in which they would be recognized
in public, was the appearance in the world of what Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, called
radical and absolute evil. Totalitarian regimes are not the "opposite" of anything: the absence of
their opposite may be the surest way of seeing totalitarianism as the crisis of our times.